Poseidon's Domain

Yesterday, we arrived in the Cape Verdes. We left from the Canaries exactly six days and 180 minutes before that. On the way here I saw a surprising amount of sea life. Multi day crossings remind me that the ocean isn't an almost lifeless habitat. I see very few animals but right below the surface there is lots of life. In contrast, there are waves on the surface, but none five feet down. As long as there's zooplankton there's plankton. When there's plankton there's small fish. With small fish there's big fish, then bigger fish and so on. You get the idea. The deep open sea is roomy and provides plenty of room for lots of fish. So why not fill up that space? All the animals are virtually chasing plankton and zooplankton.

The most bizarre animals that I saw were the flying fish. You may have pictured a fish with bird wings or with big flippers that jumped a lot or flew like birds. The flying fish we saw had four huge flippers and glided as if they were using hang gliders. They normally went about thirty feet. There were two inch fish that were too small to see gliding but ended up on Sila's deck. We saw lots of six inch fish that flew about thirty feet. The most amazing ones, though, were the ones we saw near the Cape Verde islands. They were about eighteen inches long and flew one hundred yards. Sometimes we saw just one fish flying on its own and other times, we saw groups of one hundred or more fish.

Imagine waking up at two in the morning to find that a flying fish was flopping around on your pillow and on your face. Great thing to fall asleep thinking about, isn't it? Daddy told me about a fish that flew right into the cockpit, bounced off the binnacle, and flopped around next to the window that is right over my bed. Fortunately, no fish ended up on me or my bed!

Another cool thing was seeing the porpoises. Porpoises are miniature dolphins that live in large groups of fifteen to forty. These porpoises were so numerous that they came in every size. There were old slower ones that looked like dolphins because of their size and babies that wouldn't leave their mothers. The babies were sooooooooo cute, in a small insignificant baby porpoise sort of way. We could see them riding our wake, chasing fish, hitting flying fish in the air, chowing on fish, and pulling stunts as they leapt around Sila. After ten minutes the fish figured out that our boat wasn't a great place to hang out because of porpoise risk. Sadly the porpoises decided that chasing flying fish for food was a better idea than trying, successfully, to impress a few humans floating around in the middle of nowhere.

Seeing so many different species of animals sort of surprised me because I could only see them when they came to the surface. I guess deep down (no pun intended) I knew there were so many animals in the ocean. Now that I think about it, I think that there is more life in the ocean than on land and in air combined. When I was reading Greek mythology I came across a quote from Poseidon that I didn't understand. Here it is translated from ancient Greek to modern English: "Zeus takes the sky because it looks so high but it is empty whereas the ocean is full of life." I now understand why Poseidon took the sea as his first choice.  -Porter